What is Public Speaking?
To many people the answer to this question is clear – hell on earth. For me it is an unfortunate term at best. It is excluding, narrow-minded and so laden with negative connotations that the mere mentioning makes hearts race, hands sweat and formerly comprehensible words turn into mincemeat.
In a social study in the US people were asked to rank their worst fears. That of public speaking came before a violent death!
Such a harsh verdict deserves a closer look. A closer look at
- the nature of what we are afraid of
- what ‘the public’ means
- and how we might be able to handle that terrifying activity
Nature loves communication. It allows whales to contact each other over vast distances. In some reptiles the unborn young inside the egg can have an exchange with its mother. Humans – or two-legged, upright walking, gender-neutral living beings, as our species is politically correct known these days – have even developed the wonder of the spoken word.
Interestingly enough most of our communicating happens in public. We spend far less time within our innermost circle of partners, best friends and closest family than we do in an environment widely shared with others, many of whom we don’t even know.
Adhering to codes and using elements that we are partially born with but mostly acquire throughout our lifetime, it comes natural to us to communicate with those who we meet – the public. Instead of a special activity for a chosen few, we all speak in public all the time.
It is far more than the standard image of the ‘speaker’ standing on a ‘stage’ in front of ‘hundreds of people’. Therefore, we also have to revise our image of the audience. As constant public communicators our stage can be a bus shelter or an office, the canteen or a board room – and, I admit, the raised-platform model in a conference hall.
Consequently, an audience does not have to be ‘hundreds of people’. It can be, of course, but it might also be just one person, or 20, or any other number. In the same way, as we acquire a driver’s license we can speak to any one in any setting. Or do you say: ‘Oh, I can drive and can also do it on a motorway.’? Surely not, I hope. As with anything we are taught in life, learning means acquiring a set of skills for a particular purpose, e.g. driving a car, that we then store in a virtual toolbox inside our brain. Depending on the conditions and what is expected of us, we take those skills and mix and match them as needed. Because these are ‘skills’, they can be added, improved and combined in new ways.
Similarly, communicating – including the dreaded public speaking in its standard concept – is done by grabbing this and that from a common communication toolbox and adapting it to what we are faced with.
So we are all doing it. It is an integral part of our life, not the preserved realm of the likes of Demosthenes or Winston Churchill. We do it in front of any number of people without worrying about it. Our audience is more than just ‘a few hundred people’.
What is best, we have all those skills – or at least most of them – already available. Those that we haven’t can be learned and the others refined. All it needs is sometimes a bit of help from those who have more experience and knowledge than ourselves, and always the three ‘Ps’ – practice, practice and practice.
Isn’t that what happens with everything we know and are able to do from the moment we are born? Not so scary that ‘Public Speaking’ after all, is it?!
Peter Mueller, 2008
